Facebook: only one Page per company

Facebook announced to their “Preferred Marketing Developers” that they are working on the “mandatory merge” all companies different fan pages around the world into only ONE.

So if you have several company’s fan pages, most of the time one is global and then you have the local ones, this means that you will end up with only one.

Right now, you can already do it thanks to the improvements of the admin interface.

It is an interesting way to retake control of your name in Facebook, especially if some non-authorized people did create pages on your name. I tried and it works perfectly.

But the next step for Facebook is to impose the “single-page” strategy to all companies. Facebook says that companies should use more the geo-tagging options of the admin interface rather than multiply pages. We assume that for them it will be a better cost efficiency as local pages were having a high development rate, which means a lot of same content duplicated several times in the Facebook servers. Hosting costs went crazily up on the past 3 years as many companies developed their pages and that Facebook achieved the 1 billion users.

If Facebook were a country, imagine a country with almost the same population as China but with the GDP per capita of Bangladesh. We would be either having a humanitarian catastrophe or civil war. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Facebook land, all this is virtual.

So Facebook needs desperately to MONETIZE their business. Social does not mean volunteering work in social media right? The first step is increase revenues. They extended the advertising offers. Marketplace became a multiple billion dollar tool with extended packages. This year they launched Facebook offers, which allow companies to reach fans timelines in order to advertise special offers.

Of course another way to improve profitability is to reduce the costs of your operations, reduce the debt. With a consistently growth of their users and of the content in Facebook, every month they need to add extra Tera-octets. Every minute, Facebook has almost 1 million pieces of content published on their servers. So one of the actions to reduce the costs of such servers will be to force companies to keep only one single company page in the world. This should stop the duplication of the same content in multiple pages.

But the question is: Is it interesting for companies to have one single page? Not sure. Of course centralized companies will have finally a better control of their pages content and identity. For the users, it will be easier to find the “official page”. Large companies will end up with pages with hundreds of millions fans. Could this be a “web-killer”? In deed and up to now most of the brands have more traffic in their respective websites than in their Facebook pages. But if Nike ends up with a 500 million fan page, this might be more strategic than the website. What if big companies would basically shut down their websites to dedicate themselves to their Facebook pages? People instead of using Google to search for products and services, they will use the Search function of Facebook. and there we go…. web-killer strategy.

Of course Facebook needs to improve alot their companies admin interface and features. Right now try to manage a 5 million fan page. Hard. They are right now beta-testing alot of these features, so we might get more news from them in the incoming weeks.

They are right now beta testing the tool. The Geo targetting will be improved, language management will be much more fluid so every user will see the appropriate content.

Here is what Facebook tells you:

What are Global Pages? Global Pages is a structure that allows brands to create individual localized versions of their Page while maintaining the same Page name and global metrics such as Likes and People Talking About This across all Pages. When a customer navigates to the main global page, they’ll get redirected to the most localized Page available to them. This allows people to hear from the correct Page, so that brands can deliver the right content to the right audience.Why did Facebook build it? Currently brands adopt one of two solutions to communicate with their fans worldwide: 1) a single page solution, which unifies all fans to one Page, but doesn’t have fully geo-targeted features such as the cover photo, profile picture, etc. or 2) a multi-page solution for each country which offers fully localization, but it fragments their audience and doesn’t show aggregated fans, PTAT, etc. Each solution has benefits and drawbacks. Global Pages merges these two strategies and allow brands to create many different localized Pages while maintaining a global brand community.Do brands have to transition to the new structure? No, although it is encouraged. Not only will it allow a brand’s audience to easily find and like the best Page for them, this is also an opportunity to create a fully localized Page experience including a localized cover photo, profile photo, Page name, apps, timeline, pinned posts, and news feed stories.Does each Page get its own Facebook web address? Yes, each Page can have a unique Facebook web address for each local Page as well as for the main global Page. When users navigate to the main global Page’s address, they’ll be redirected to the appropriate local Page. When users navigate to a local address, they’ll go directly to the local Page, regardless of whatever country/region they are located inCan more than one page share the same web address? No, each Page should have a unique web address.Will users see the URL for the main global page or the URL for the local page in theirbrowser? They’ll see the URL for the local Page. For example, if they’re viewing the local Japan Page, they’ll see facebook.com/brandJP instead of facebook.com/brand.

What do you think? Ready to share your passion with millions of people? Or do you prefer smaller communities?LA

Info sourced at Facebook insiders. All content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available.

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